Lil Wayne

Rebirth

You probably don’t need one more 30% pisstake on this irredeemable mess of a record, currently slotted as it is at the lowest possible point on Metacritic’s recent music list. It is apparently significantly worse than new efforts by Mudvayne and 30 Seconds to Mars, and historically can be compared as the artistic midpoint between Life on Display (2003) by Puddle of Mudd and Results May Vary (2003) by Limp Bizkit. Chris Brown fist-fought his fucking girlfriend, forward-thinking pop starlet and universal dreamgirl Rihanna, and his new record still garnered two more metapoints from critics than Weezy’s Rebirth. The ire for this titanically obvious misstep was instantaneous, its bad buzz like some sort of weird, vaguely interesting Internet gonorrhea. Thus, you probably do not need another pisstake noting how truly, deeply awful it all is, how completely devoid of artistry or worth it is, but alack: the people clamor. Here is another pisstake.

One envisions glorious, candy-colored mountains of narcotics throughout the recording of this project, which I am assuming for rhetorical reasons took place over the course of a single night, and one envisions troops of hangers-on lounging throughout the studio either too fucked up to tell Wayne “Dude, stop,” or so fucked up they thought he might be onto something. And can you imagine what it must be like within this second class of person’s headspace? This assemblage of studio goons, weed carriers, callgirls, coke dealers and guitar players? What are the contours of their thoughts? Their dreams and emotions as they sat around watching Wayne create this record? Can you imagine such a group?

These are people who heard the Auto-tuned logorrhaea of “Knockout” and nodded approvingly, the way the actually sung chorus by Nicki Minaj is contrasted by Wayne’s vocal spatterings, and, from their various spots in the recording studio, signed off in the affirmative. Green lighted that shit. Or, when Wayne looked up at DJ Infamous from the recording booth and said, “Listen, DJ Infamous, listen. Turn the Auto-tune down on this track. They gotta hear the timbre of my voice on this shit,” and then when DJ Infamous was like, “You know what you should do, Lil’ Wayne? Is do the hook with a British accent,” and Lil’ Wayne went, “Oh my God, you are so fucking right, DJ Infamous,” then this cabal of people looked up from their mountains of crushed up Ritalin and their big purple goblets of boxed wine and said, “Great idea, great, great fucking idea,” and then went back to work on their Ritalin, the room full of the faint cinnamon crackle of Clove smoke.

A lot of critics sort of want to find a pinpointed moment of idiocy on this record that transcends its surroundings; they want a novelty track to justify the time they’ve wasted in listening to it. I am such a man, I am no different: For me, it’s “Paradice,” all Guitar Hero lonely-wanderer guitars on the intro, Wayne intoning from the solitude of the spotlight, “Moola baayay,” and various slatternly coquettes just out of their fucking brains on Robitussin on velvet couches barely able to withstand the magnitude of Wayne’s arena-rock hook. “Oh no,” they whisper to themselves as Wayne hits his chest, “this truly ain’t Paradice” (sic). They stumble over to the mini-fridge hours later, walking like giants walk over cities, the carpet spattered with vomit and the type of ejaculate that dribbles out of flaccid, coked-out penises, and they retrieve a water bottle which they empty and fashion into a gravity bong so that the synth lines on “Drop the World” will make more sense. These people, these yes-men and yes-women who barely know what’s going on, or no (sic) anything at this point, these approvalmatons just showed up at the studio behind Wayne one day and plumb forgot how to leave, these people fall asleep later in the session to the Kidz Bop thrash “The Price is Wrong,” choking fatally on their vomit at some point early in the morning while DJ Nasty is multi-tracking one of Shannell’s three guest spots here.

Speaking of which, Shannell guests three fucking times here. Don’t know who she is? You don’t need to: Rebirth is career suicide for everybody except for Lil’ Wayne, just as hanging with him drug-wise for a night would be (I see him coaching a new friend, “No, you have to inhale through your eye“). I’ve got no positive upswing to this shitheap of a record, no let’s-round-things-up last paragraph. The critics who enjoy a narrative will call his next record a “return to form,” but these people will be liars, because he already recorded a great follow-up to Tha Carter 3. This is just an awful fucking record, and way worse than Wayne fans, obnoxious as we can be, deserve. To Weezy, I could ask why, or at least wtf, but I’d rather just say:

Have fun in the slammer, buddy. And think about what you’ve done, yeah?